Something’s missing at Deco Pizzeria

It doesn’t leave you hungry for more, just leaves you still hungry

Deco Pizzeria’s original location on Fredericksburg Road is a cool building, a stylized 2011 retooling of a 1930s gas station, where service bay arches stand as portals to the dining room and kitchen. With its pastel green adobe accents, Gatsbystyle signage and a flanking line of flamingos, the mission-style structure seems right at home in the Deco District.

Deco Pizzeria has managed to build an audience in San Antonio. They added another location in the Medical Center area in 2018, then followed with a Deco Pizzeria Express on the East Side this month.

Besides pizza, they have sandwiches, salads, calzones and cocktails, even Fiesta-style chicken on a stick. Most of the menu is 20 percent off Monday through Thursday, and Sunday brunch includes a San Anto pizza with barbacoa.

From my experience, though, it all feels like window dressing for pizza with the low spark of chain delivery, with crusts so thin and dry and toppings so sparse that at first, I thought a few of the lightweight boxes they brought to the table were empties for the leftovers to come. I was told that in pandemic times at Deco, even dine-in customers get their pizza served in boxes, which just adds to the letdown

of pizza priced as high as places in this series with better presentation and better product.

Best pizza: Sometimes,

“best pizza” is just the one that wins by attrition. Or in this case, addition.

By sheer number of ingredients, the Deco Supreme pizza at least achieved some mass with pepperoni, sausage, Canadian bacon, onion, green peppers and mushrooms. But it was still so underprovisioned that the pizza cutter went through it like butter and left grooves in the box underneath. At $24 for a 16-inch pie, there just wasn’t enough heft to support the price.

Other pizzas: At least the Deco Supreme was cooked until the crust gained some infrastructure, something I can’t say for the pale, mushy base of the Florentine pizza, which tried hard to compensate with Alfredo sauce, spinach and grilled chicken but still couldn’t get to a place where I thought it was OK to pay $16 for a personalsize 10-inch pizza.

I liked the super-spicy Buffalo sauce on the Buffalo Chicken Pizza ($16 for a 10-inch pie), but there wasn’t much chicken to speak of, and the strands of unmelted cheese combined with zigzags of warm ranch dressing made me think of a home pizza experiment gone bad.

I appreciate the simplicity of pesto, the interplay of olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and basil. But Deco’s Pesto pizza ($10 for a 10-inch pie) was so light, so thin, so sparse that it seemed more like pesto DNA, more a canapé than a pizza pie.

Photos by Mike Sutter / Staff The Deco Supreme pizza at Deco Pizzeria on Fredericksburg Road includes pepperoni, sausage, Canadian bacon, red onion, green peppers and mushrooms.

The Florentine pizza includes Alfredo sauce, spinach, grilled chicken and Parmesan cheese.